Tracking Topology Dynamicity for Link Prediction in Intermittently Connected Wireless Networks

Through several studies, it has been highlighted that mobility patterns in mobile networks are driven by human behaviors. This effect has been particularly observed in intermittently connected networks like DTN (Delay Tolerant Networks). Given that common social intentions generate similar human behavior, it is relevant to exploit this knowledge in the network protocols design, e.g. to identify the closeness degree between two nodes. In this paper, we propose a temporal link prediction technique for DTN which quantifies the behavior similarity between each pair of nodes and makes use of it to predict future links. We attest that the tensor-based technique is effective for temporal link prediction applied to the intermittently connected networks. The validity of this method is proved when the prediction is made in a distributed way (i.e. with local information) and its performance is compared to well-known link prediction metrics proposed in the literature.Comment: Published in the proceedings of the 8th International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), Limassol, Cyprus, 201

The impact of message replication on the performance of opportunistic networks for sensed data collection

Opportunistic networks (OppNets) provide a scalable solution for collecting delay-tolerant data from sensors to their respective gateways. Portable handheld user devices contribute significantly to the scalability of OppNets since their number increases according to user population and they closely follow human movement patterns. Hence, OppNets for sensed data collection are characterised by high node population and degrees of spatial locality inherent to user movement. We study the impact of these characteristics on the performance of existing OppNet message replication techniques. Our findings reveal that the existing replication techniques are not specifically designed to cope with these characteristics. This raises concerns regarding excessive message transmission overhead and throughput degradations due to resource constraints and technological limitations associated with portable handheld user devices. Based on concepts derived from the study, we suggest design guidelines to augment existing message replication techniques. We also follow our design guidelines to propose a message replication technique, namely Locality Aware Replication (LARep). Simulation results show that LARep achieves better network performance under high node population and degrees of spatial locality as compared with existing techniques

Routing protocol optimization in challenged multihop wireless networks

Durant ces dernières années, de nombreux travaux de recherches ont été menés dans le domaine des réseaux multi-sauts sans fil à contraintes (MWNs: Multihop Wireless Networks). Grâce à l'évolution de la technologie des systèmes mico-electro-méchaniques (MEMS) et, depuis peu, les nanotechnologies, les MWNs sont une solution de choix pour une variété de problèmes. Le principal avantage de ces réseaux est leur faible coût de production qui permet de développer des applications ayant un unique cycle de vie. Cependant, si le coût de fabrication des nœuds constituant ce type de réseaux est assez faible, ces nœuds sont aussi limités en capacité en termes de: rayon de transmission radio, bande passante, puissance de calcul, mémoire, énergie, etc. Ainsi, les applications qui visent l'utilisation des MWNs doivent être conçues avec une grande précaution, et plus spécialement la conception de la fonction de routage, vu que les communications radio constituent la tâche la plus consommatrice d'énergie.Le but de cette thèse est d'analyser les différents défis et contraintes qui régissent la conception d'applications utilisant les MWNs. Ces contraintes se répartissent tout le long de la pile protocolaire. On trouve au niveau application des contraintes comme: la qualité de service, la tolérance aux pannes, le modèle de livraison de données au niveau application, etc. Au niveau réseau, on peut citer les problèmes de la dynamicité de la topologie réseau, la présence de trous, la mobilité, etc. Nos contributions dans cette thèse sont centrées sur l'optimisation de la fonction de routage en considérant les besoins de l'application et les contraintes du réseau. Premièrement, nous avons proposé un protocole de routage multi-chemin "en ligne" pour les applications orientées QoS utilisant des réseaux de capteurs multimédia. Ce protocole repose sur la construction de multiples chemins durant la transmission des paquets vers leur destination, c'est-à-dire sans découverte et construction des routes préalables. En permettant des transmissions parallèles, ce protocole améliore la transmission de bout-en-bout en maximisant la bande passante du chemin agrégé et en minimisant les délais. Ainsi, il permet de répondre aux exigences des applications orientées QoS.Deuxièmement, nous avons traité le problème du routage dans les réseaux mobiles tolérants aux délais. Nous avons commencé par étudier la connectivité intermittente entre les différents et nous avons extrait un modèle pour les contacts dans le but pouvoir prédire les future contacts entre les nœuds. En se basant sur ce modèle, nous avons proposé un protocole de routage, qui met à profit la position géographique des nœuds, leurs trajectoires, et la prédiction des futurs contacts dans le but d'améliorer les décisions de routage. Le protocole proposé permet la réduction des délais de bout-en-bout tout en utilisant d'une manière efficace les ressources limitées des nœuds que ce soit en termes de mémoire (pour le stockage des messages dans les files d'attentes) ou la puissance de calcul (pour l'exécution de l'algorithme de prédiction).Finalement, nous avons proposé un mécanisme de contrôle de la topologie avec un algorithme de routage des paquets pour les applications orientés évènement et qui utilisent des réseaux de capteurs sans fil statiques. Le contrôle de la topologie est réalisé à travers l'utilisation d'un algorithme distribué pour l'ordonnancement du cycle de service (sleep/awake). Les paramètres de l'algorithme proposé peuvent être réglés et ajustés en fonction de la taille du voisinage actif désiré (le nombre moyen de voisin actifs pour chaque nœud). Le mécanisme proposé assure un compromis entre le délai pour la notification d'un événement et la consommation d'énergie globale dans le réseau.Great research efforts have been carried out in the field of challenged multihop wireless networks (MWNs). Thanks to the evolution of the Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology and nanotechnologies, multihop wireless networks have been the solution of choice for a plethora of problems. The main advantage of these networks is their low manufacturing cost that permits one-time application lifecycle. However, if nodes are low-costly to produce, they are also less capable in terms of radio range, bandwidth, processing power, memory, energy, etc. Thus, applications need to be carefully designed and especially the routing task because radio communication is the most energy-consuming functionality and energy is the main issue for challenged multihop wireless networks.The aim of this thesis is to analyse the different challenges that govern the design of challenged multihop wireless networks such as applications challenges in terms of quality of service (QoS), fault-tolerance, data delivery model, etc., but also networking challenges in terms of dynamic network topology, topology voids, etc. Our contributions in this thesis focus on the optimization of routing under different application requirements and network constraints. First, we propose an online multipath routing protocol for QoS-based applications using wireless multimedia sensor networks. The proposed protocol relies on the construction of multiple paths while transmitting data packets to their destination, i.e. without prior topology discovery and path establishment. This protocol achieves parallel transmissions and enhances the end-to-end transmission by maximizing path bandwidth and minimizing the delays, and thus meets the requirements of QoS-based applications. Second, we tackle the problem of routing in mobile delay-tolerant networks by studying the intermittent connectivity of nodes and deriving a contact model in order to forecast future nodes' contacts. Based upon this contact model, we propose a routing protocol that makes use of nodes' locations, nodes' trajectories, and inter-node contact prediction in order to perform forwarding decisions. The proposed routing protocol achieves low end-to-end delays while using efficiently constrained nodes' resources in terms of memory (packet queue occupancy) and processing power (forecasting algorithm). Finally, we present a topology control mechanism along a packet forwarding algorithm for event-driven applications using stationary wireless sensor networks. Topology control is achieved by using a distributed duty-cycle scheduling algorithm. Algorithm parameters can be tuned according to the desired node's awake neighbourhood size. The proposed topology control mechanism ensures trade-off between event-reporting delay and energy consumption.BORDEAUX1-Bib.electronique (335229901) / SudocSudocFranceF

Trust Management for P2P application in Delay Tolerant Mobile Ad-hoc Networks. An Investigation into the development of a Trust Management Framework for Peer to Peer File Sharing Applications in Delay Tolerant Disconnected Mobile Ad-hoc Networks.

Security is essential to communication between entities in the internet. Delay tolerant and disconnected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) are a class of networks characterized by high end-to-end path latency and frequent end-to-end disconnections and are often termed as challenged networks. In these networks nodes are sparsely populated and without the existence of a central server, acquiring global information is difficult and impractical if not impossible and therefore traditional security schemes proposed for MANETs cannot be applied. This thesis reports trust management schemes for peer to peer (P2P) application in delay tolerant disconnected MANETs. Properties of a profile based file sharing application are analyzed and a framework for structured P2P overlay over delay tolerant disconnected MANETs is proposed. The framework is implemented and tested on J2ME based smart phones using Bluetooth communication protocol. A light weight Content Driven Data Propagation Protocol (CDDPP) for content based data delivery in MANETs is presented. The CDDPP implements a user profile based content driven P2P file sharing application in disconnected MANETs. The CDDPP protocol is further enhanced by proposing an adaptive opportunistic multihop content based routing protocol (ORP). ORP protocol considers the store-carry-forward paradigm for multi-hop packet delivery in delay tolerant MANETs and allows multi-casting to selected number of nodes. Performance of ORP is compared with a similar autonomous gossiping (A/G) protocol using simulations. This work also presents a framework for trust management based on dynamicity aware graph re-labelling system (DA-GRS) for trust management in mobile P2P applications. The DA-GRS uses a distributed algorithm to identify trustworthy nodes and generate trustable groups while isolating misleading or untrustworthy nodes. Several simulations in various environment settings show the effectiveness of the proposed framework in creating trust based communities. This work also extends the FIRE distributed trust model for MANET applications by incorporating witness based interactions for acquiring trust ratings. A witness graph building mechanism in FIRE+ is provided with several trust building policies to identify malicious nodes and detect collusive behaviour in nodes. This technique not only allows trust computation based on witness trust ratings but also provides protection against a collusion attack. Finally, M-trust, a light weight trust management scheme based on FIRE+ trust model is presented

Conception d’un support de communication opportuniste pour les services pervasifs

The vision of pervasive computing of building interactive smart spaces in the physical environment is gradually heading from the research domain to reality. Computing capacity is moving beyond personal computers to many day-to-day devices, and these devices become, thanks to multiple interfaces, capable of communicating directly with one another or of connecting to the Internet.In this thesis, we are interested in a kind of pervasive computing environment that forms what we call an Intermittently Connected Hybrid Network (ICHN). An ICHN is a network composed of two parts: a fixed and a mobile part. The fixed part is formed of some fixed infostations (potentially connected together with some fixed infrastructure, typically the Internet). The mobile part, on the other hand, is formed of smartphones carried by nomadic people. While the fixed part is mainly stable, the mobile part is considered challenging and form what is called an Opportunistic Network. Indeed, relying on short-range communication means coupled with the free movements of people and radio interferences lead to frequent disconnections. To perform a network-wide communication, the "store, carry and forward" approach is usually applied. With this approach, a message can be stored temporarily on a device, in order to be forwarded later when circumstances permit. Any device can opportunistically be used as an intermediate relay to facilitate the propagation of a message from one part of the network to another. In this context, the provisioning of pervasive services is particularly challenging, and requires revisiting important components of the provisioning process, such as performing pervasive service discovery and invocation with the presence of connectivity disruptions and absence of both end-to-end paths and access continuity due to user mobility. This thesis addresses the problems of providing network-wide service provisioning in ICHNs and proposes solutions for pervasive service discovery, invocation and access continuity. Concerning service discovery challenge, we propose TAO-DIS, a service discovery protocol that performs an automatic and fast service discovery mechanism. TAO-DIS takes into account the hybrid nature of an ICHN and that the majority of services are provided by infostations. It permits mobile users to discover all the services in the surrounding environment in order to identify and choose the most convenient ones. To allow users to interact with the discovered services, we introduce TAO-INV. TAO-INV is a service invocation protocol specifically designed for ICHNs. It relies on a set of heuristics and mechanisms that ensures performing efficient routing of messages (both service requests and responses) between fixed infostations and mobile clients while preserving both low values of overhead and round trip delays. Since some infostations in the network might be connected, we propose a soft handover mechanism that modifies the invocation process in order to reduce service delivery delays. This handover mechanism takes into consideration the opportunistic nature of the mobile part of the ICHN. We have performed various experiments to evaluate our solutions and compare them with other protocols designed for ad hoc and opportunistic networks. The obtained results tend to prove that our solutions outperform these protocols, namely thanks to the optimizations we have developed for ICHNs. In our opinion, building specialized protocols that benefit from techniques specifically designed for ICHNs is an approach that should be pursued, in complement with research works on general-purpose communication protocolsLa vision de l'informatique ubiquitaire permettant de construire des espaces intelligents interactifs dans l'environnement physique passe, peu à peu, du domaine de la recherche à la réalité. La capacité de calcul ne se limite plus à l'ordinateur personnel mais s'intègre dans de multiples appareils du quotidien, et ces appareils deviennent, grâce à plusieurs interfaces, capables de communiquer directement les uns avec les autres ou bien de se connecter à Internet.Dans cette thèse, nous nous sommes intéressés à un type d'environnement cible de l'informatique ubiquitaire qui forme ce que nous appelons un réseau hybride à connexions intermittentes (ICHN). Un ICHN est un réseau composé de deux parties : une partie fixe et une partie mobile. La partie fixe est constituée de plusieurs infostations fixes (potentiellement reliées entre elles avec une infrastructure fixe, typiquement l'Internet). La partie mobile, quant à elle, est constituée de smartphones portés par des personnes nomades. Tandis que la partie fixe est principalement stable, la partie mobile pose un certain nombre de défis propres aux réseaux opportunistes. En effet, l'utilisation de moyens de communication à courte portée couplée à des déplacements de personnes non contraints et à des interférences radio induit des déconnexions fréquentes. Le concept du "store, carry and forward" est alors habituellement appliqué pour permettre la communication sur l'ensemble du réseau. Avec cette approche, un message peut être stocké temporairement sur un appareil avant d'être transféré plus tard quand les circonstances sont plus favorables. Ainsi, n'importe quel appareil devient un relai de transmission opportuniste qui permet de faciliter la propagation d'un message dans le réseau. Dans ce contexte, la fourniture de services est particulièrement problématique, et exige de revisiter les composants principaux du processus de fourniture, tels que la découverte et l'invocation de service, en présence de ruptures de connectivité et en l'absence de chemins de bout en bout. Cette thèse aborde les problèmes de fourniture de service sur l'ensemble d'un ICHN et propose des solutions pour la découverte de services, l'invocation et la continuité d'accès. En ce qui concerne le défi de la découverte de services, nous proposons TAO-DIS, un protocole qui met en œuvre un mécanisme automatique et rapide de découverte de services. TAO-DIS tient compte de la nature hybride d'un ICHN et du fait que la majorité des services sont fournis par des infostations. Il permet aux utilisateurs mobiles de découvrir tous les services dans l'environnement afin d'identifier et de choisir les plus intéressants. Pour permettre aux utilisateurs d'interagir avec les services découverts, nous introduisons TAO-INV. TAO-INV est un protocole d'invocation de service spécialement conçu pour les ICHN. Il se fonde sur un ensemble d'heuristiques et de mécanismes qui assurent un acheminement efficace des messages (des requêtes et des réponses de services) entre les infostations fixes et les clients mobiles tout en conservant un surcoût et des temps de réponses réduits. Puisque certaines infostations dans le réseau peuvent être reliées entre elles, nous proposons un mécanisme de continuité d'accès (handover) qui modifie le processus d'invocation pour réduire les délais de délivrance. Dans sa définition, il est tenu compte de la nature opportuniste de la partie mobile de l'ICHN. Nous avons mené diverses expérimentations pour évaluer nos solutions et les comparer à d'autres protocoles conçus pour des réseaux ad hoc et des réseaux opportunistes. Les résultats obtenus tendent à montrer que nos solutions surpassent ces autres protocoles, notamment grâce aux optimisations que nous avons développées pour les ICHN. À notre avis, construire des protocoles spécialisés qui tirent parti des techniques spécifiquement conçues pour les ICHN est une approche à poursuivre en complément des recherches sur des protocoles de communication polyvalent

Survey on RPL enhancements: a focus on topology, security and mobility

International audienceA few years ago, the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL) was proposed by IETF as the routing standard designed for classes of networks in which both nodes and their interconnects are constrained. Since then, great attention has been paid by the scientific and industrial communities for the protocol evaluation and improvement. Indeed, depending on applications scenarios, constraints related to the target environments or other requirements, many adaptations and improvements can be made. So, since the initial release of the standard, several implementations were proposed, some targeting specific optimization goals whereas others would optimize several criteria while building the routing topology. They include, but are not limited to, extending the network lifetime, maximizing throughput at the sink node, avoiding the less secured nodes, considering nodes or sink mobility. Sometimes, to consider the Quality of Service (QoS), it is necessary to consider several of those criteria at the same time. This paper reviews recent works on RPL and highlights major contributions to its improvement, especially those related to topology optimization, security and mobility. We aim to provide an insight into relevant efforts around the protocol, draw some lessons and give useful guidelines for future developments